I usually ignore idiotic web pages like the Empire Page, but this editorial about the Columbia Shuttle disaster pissed me off enough to write about it. Basically I'm stunned by this line "They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster" (4). I guess Mr. Hacker hasn't heard of the ozone hole that developed over Australia or the substantial thinning of the ozone layer everywhere else.

Tell me--when I die of skin cancer because idiots like Mr. Hacker with idiotic friends in Congress repeal the ban on Freon--can my friends and family sue the Ayn Rand Institute?

Three questions:

Why do I want an Andrei Kirilenko lunch box that a local oil change waste of money is offering?

Why did I laugh so hard at this page?

Is the BBC obsessed with parrots? (They had a story about Winston Churchill's foulmouthed parrot--still alive and kicking after all these years--some weeks ago.)

On this snowy winter Sunday I just finished watching Tom Twyker's Winterschlafer. Like his other films (Run, Lola, Run or Der Krieger und der Kaiserin) there is a hypnotic quality to the cinematography. I would not argue, however, that it lacks tension since the movie itself is all about uncertainty and the struggle of not knowing, but having the overwhelming desire to know.

The story is simple in action, but complicated in the interaction of characters. There are 5 central characters who are all bound together by an accident that claimed the life of the daughter of one of the characters--a farmer--who spends the rest of the film trying to find one of the other main characters whom he believes to be guilty of causing the accident (which is not the case). This person has suffered brain damage before and has very sketchy short term memory, so he does not recall the accident or stealing the car of another main character (so has no clear point of reference to make a moral decision, one might assume.) Bound up in all this are two female characters--one a nurse who cares for the daughter of the farmer while she lays in a coma in the hospital) and the other a translator who has a turbid relationship with the guy who's car was stolen.

The film is somehow satisfying even though the characters never really find the answers they are seeking, and, in fact, end up taking actions that ultimately lead them down the wrong path and provide them no answers. Ultimately the play on coincidence is important, since all the characters and all their actions are tied together somehow, but they keep missing the vital connections between them, and continue wending on their way in a sort of free fall of life. It is a life of accident and habit, if that makes any sense. They keep plugging along, missing all the connections. As the memory challenged character says to his infant child (yet another accident in the movie) "You aren't really hungry are you?" Somehow that wraps it up--the baby is there and cries out in hunger as if only to get attention to try to bring the other closer: To not sleep through it all.